[hotani]

I know it sounds backwards, but it looks like the best way to get some of these files to play. I have a dual 867 and it chokes pretty hard when trying to play an HD xvid encoded at 720p. After reading somewhere that Apple's DVD player actually uses the GPU, I decided to try and make a VIDEO_TS folder from the file and watch it that way.

ffmpegX created 3 files, then died. I've tried twice since and it can't seem to finish the task and create a VIDEO_TS folder. One of the files it created which was video only, played back beautifully at full 1280x720 resoltuion with VLC so I am hopeful of this process, just can't get a complete working file.

Any experiences with this conversion? I'm suspecting it could be something wrong with the file itself, I have another .avi I can try tonight and see if that works any better.

[f1000]

Converting a movie from one lossy format to another will reduce its visual quality. Moreover, I doubt that the resolution of your converted file is truly 1280x720 despite what VLC says. Select "Show Movie Info" in QT Player to get the actual resolution. In any case, DVD Player will choke on non-standard resolution DVDs, and VLC doesn't use GPU acceleration.

[hotani]

It actually is converting 720p to 720p, there is some degredation in quality but it still looks good. The conversion fails every time, but it does get most of the way with a working albeit incomplete .mpg file at the end. This file plays better than the original .avi, but i'm not going to mess with creating the VIDEO_TS folder anymore, i don't think ffmpegX is up to it.

Now I'm trying to go from 720p to EDTV (850x480p AKA Apple's "Small HD" format), so we'll see how that goes.

[hotani]

If anyone is interested, I have found a way to convert HD video to a not-quite-HD-but-better-than-DVD quality file. Using ffmpegX, I set it to output an mp4 file using ffmpeg as the video encoder and usually AAC for audio. Click the 'two pass' switch in the 'Options' tab. Set the video size (if 16:9) to 848x480. Next time I might try going 60x which would be 960x540.

This produced a larger file, the original 1280x720 DivX or XviD video was around 700MB and the resulting conversion ended up being just over 1GB. However, for what it is, the video looks very good. From my couch 8-9' away the quality is not quite that of 720p, but it looks obviously better than a DVD and most importantly it plays without dropping any frames on my slow-ass G4.

EDIT: added vid size.

[euchomai]

Thanks for the tips hotani